Who is God in “A Course in Miracles”?

Exploring Our Cause and the Love from Which We Come

Last week’s post explored the concept of Christ in A Course in Miracles. Before that, I discussed the Holy Spirit. This week’s post discusses the remaining third person of the holy trinity: God.

Perhaps among the three members of this trinity, explaining or discussing God is the most elusive, abstract, and removed from our terrestrial, earthly experience.

Ultimately, we can come to experience God, but we cannot fully know or comprehend Him. Our human faculties are such that the fullness, grandeur, and awesomeness of God are and forever will remain beyond the scope of human comprehension.

Our capacity to understand or comprehend God would be like attempting to teach a dog physics. No matter how it is explained, the dog cannot understand it.

Yet, the Course nonetheless provides some valuable principles for coming to have an experience of God, or an experience of love. Such principles or arguments are neither meant to define nor limit the construct or notion of God. Instead, they are entry points for us in our narrow and limited capacity to know and understand—the Course employs language to explain a reality far exceeding words' limits. Words are but symbols of symbols.

We, therefore, approach an understanding of God and an appreciation for God not from the concrete, material, or embodied experience of the self but rather from abstract principles that transcend the material world.

God is our cause, and we are its effects. God is the mind that thinks of us. We are God's thoughts. God is love, and God is everything. There is nothing other than God. There is only love, only light, and only joy.

God creates, and we are His creations. God extends Himself, and we are that extension. God created us and gave us everything He has.

We, however, did not create God. In all other respects, we are the same as God.

God is the ultimate reality. God does not perceive the lovelessness of this world. God perceives only what is real: the love we extend and the creations we bring forth.

The aspect of God known as the Holy Spirit bridges the perception from lovelessness to love. Yet, God Himself remains removed from the workings of this world. We are called to acknowledge this world's illusory and temporal quality by aligning our thoughts with Him, with love, and with Heaven.

We are always and forever with God. The metaphysics of reality is not subject to time and space. There is no past or future. There is only an ongoing, ever-present moment where we are one with that which is our source. This does not change.

We can use the experiences of this life as tools and opportunities to remember our truth and oneness with God, or we can use them as fodder and justification for the illusion of our separation from Him. The choice is ours. Yet, his presence in the Holy Spirit and in the truth of ourselves as Christ is always there, calling us back to remember Him and our ultimate reality.

Perhaps this post's musings are unsatisfying. As creatures of intellect, we often demand clear explanations, examples, and concrete answers. I argue that, from a Course perspective, the intellect is a reductive space for contemplating God.

God is not known through the intellect. We come to know and feel God through the heart.

The experience of God is what matters. Intellectual arguments about what, who, when, or how God is are secondary and of secondary importance.

What is essential is finding with yourself, your neighbors, and the world at large.

Forgiveness is the vehicle through which we can come to do so.

Thanks, everyone, and have a great week.